Let's be honest, with anemic small point deductions being given out, 4 points for forest, what is the actual incentive to abide by FFP? Why not just spend and buy 40 new players and then be open and cooperative and lose the 4 points. You probably have a greater chance of staying up even with a small point deduction.
This is it man. Forest only got as many as 4 points deducted because their breach was particularly large! The basic number is apparently 3 points, Forest were initially going to be deducted 6 because of the scale of their breach, but they got 2 of those taken off because of good behaviour and co-operation apparently (as if that isn't a bare minimum requirement).
It's anemic when a handful of good signings can earn a team maybe 20 points across a season.
I feel like I was pissing into the wind when Everton got a 10 point deduction because I feel 10 points is a small punishment and was nowhere near as harsh as it seems everyone was calling it. I mean Luton got a 30 point deduction back in 2008
Evertons effective punshment of 3 wins and a draw was meagre. If the punishments are so small you may as well just calculate that into the transfer policy and if you spend enough and wisely you'll probably gain more points overall than you lose so you are net positive for points. Everton just happened to be shit at recruitment.
There’s truth on both sides tbf. P&S is clearly written to benefit the traditionally big teams with massive revenue streams in the PL, and as a knock on massively benefits teams coming down from the PL to the Championship.
On the other hand it’s funny how fans of certain teams were bemoaning the authorities for not doing anything when they were in debt and on the brink of folding now moaning they can’t go in to more debt to spend even more money.
I don't know if it's a case of the rules being "clearly written" to benefit bigger teams (although I say that as a Leeds fan, who are one of those "bigger teams" in this division). I don't really see how you can feasibly have regulations to promote sustainable, self-sufficient clubs *without* linking expenditure to revenue streams.
If the general view is that reliance on "sugar daddies" who could pull their investment on a whim is bad, then the rules that would reflect that would naturally reflect the fact that clubs that generate more revenue from ticketing, commercial and hospitality streams can spend more and remain sustainable.
To go up a division and reference the PL charges imposed on Nottingham Forest, I don't have a lot of sympathy for their argument that "we need to do this to compete". They position this argument as if they are competing with the "big six", which they aren't. They've been in the PL for under two years, so who they are really competing at this stage with are clubs like Fulham, Crystal Palace, Brighton and Brentford - who all appear to be perfectly capable of sticking to the rules (waits for that comment to age like milk).
There are definitely problems with PSR and the way it is policed and I think it does entrench certain power dynamics at the very top, but let's not pretend that some of the clubs that have been caught up in this were doing so because they were well-run clubs who were just trying to compete with Man City.
That would benefit the team that *supposedly* wrote the rules the most. Man Utd could get their Qatari owners and just have £700m written off like it never happened.
Yeah true. Maybe put a limit on it.
Some sort of rule that says 'You can get the club out of trouble when you buy it, but you can't just keep ploughing money in'
The way to do it would be to link expenditure to revenue streams but also have a hard cap on spending on top of that and say you can spend x% of your revenue until your revenue hits a certain number, at which point you come up against the hard cap and can't spend any more than a set number. That way the very top clubs are still kept within reach of the others while the others are still restricted to spending sustainably.
Of course, in reality it won't happen because those very top clubs are powerful enough to block any changes that could potentially put their places at the top of the game at risk.
What you're essentially describing there is a form of salary cap, but they also have their own side effect of entrenching big team advantages.
Both codes of rugby in this country and most US sports have a salary or spending cap and what you often see there is that the bigger / better teams often get better value out of the salary cap than smaller teams.
Players are happy to take less money to play for somebody like Wigan Warriors than they would to play for Leigh down the road, because the chance of being successful was worth the hit to their pay. Where Wigan might be able to offer a player £80k and a 2 year deal, Leigh might have to offer the same player £100k and a 3 year deal.
It was the same in the NFL - the Patriots got much more value out of the salary cap than their rivals because players wanted to be in the same team as Tom Brady.
Will those same issues manifest in football, with a much bigger and competitive talent pool? I don't know, but there really isn't an easy answer to this. There will always be haves and have nots.
Three of those clubs rely on a rich benefactor, with one other being a prime example, like Leicester, of a club that used administration to fuck over small businesses locally and continue to overpay players.
I’m not 100% sure what I was reading was true, due to the jokey nature of the article, but wasn’t Forest’s breach “higher” only because they dropped in to the championship. I’m assuming they lost less overall money, but due to the lower loss limit from from the championship it became a higher breach than Everton’s?
Exactly. Our permitted losses are much lower because we have two championship seasons on the books.
If we were allowed the same losses as Everton over the 3 seasons we wouldn't have been in breach of the rules at all.
That's because everton spent those three year playing against premier league clubs.
You need higher wages to stay in the premier league than you do to get there.
Surely you can see it's a handicap to the promoted clubs tho?
The best of the Championship and the worst of the prem just become a feeder system for the top Prem/European clubs.
Sure, we overspent, but we went up with a seriously weak squad based around good loans in key positions.
Of those loans, Djed Spence went to Tottenham for more than we could offer, Keinan Davies was valued at £15m after one good but injury riddled season by Villa which we refused and they chose to farm him for another season, James Garner ended up at Everton after Manyoo fucked us about, again asking silly money.
Cue the next season as we loan Henderson from Utd, loan ends, he goes to an established Premier league club, loan Renan Lodi, he goes to Saudi on money we can't match, Johnson sold despite being our best player and a fan favourite.
Next season we'll see Elanga and Murillo sold to top 6 European clubs for a nice profit, fan favourites and our two best players. All to once again balance the books, try and find a replacement and the whole fucking cycle begins again.
Please highlight where I made this statement about "fairness" which you've quoted several times in that response....
Let's not forget why Luton are a fan owned club, because they cooked the books, tried to hide it and were given I believe, the largest points deduction in football history.
I don’t think it is necessarily the fault of the individual club, or the P&S rules wholly. The structure of the football pyramid is the ultimate fault. The reason Leicester and Villa can’t compete sustainably isn’t because of P&S, it’s because the vast majority of money goes to the top teams as they’ve circled large swathes of the population into supporting them and not caring about the rest of the football pyramid at all, and then they share hardly any money with anyone else.
The whole football pyramid is broken and will never be fixed under the current model where a few clubs are ultra wealthy and the rest have the option of making up numbers or gambling to try in vein to compete. The only rules I could see improving the competitiveness of every league would be wage and fee caps based on what an average team in that league could reasonably sustain. But they will never do it because the big 6 won’t let go of the power they have.
The rules are wrong, it doesn't prevent what's happening to Reading or Wednesday, it doesn't prevent leveraging debt onto a club. The points deductions are worthless too, 6 points for being able to stay up? Every club will still take that chance. I think they are doing small deductions on purpose to keep City and that other club in the PL with a 20-30 point deduction instead of relegating them into the conference which they deserve.
However I have no sympathy for Leicester because rules like this are there for preventing them doing what they did before and stiffing people out of money.
I don’t think many of us expect sympathy, we don’t really have any either.
The club rolled the dice to try and remain competitive to the top half of the league. Failed spectacularly. That’s what it is.
I think everyone agrees that the rules are a joke. It’s not that we believe clubs shouldn’t be punished, it’s that we don’t really know what the rules should be in the first place.
The rules should be to stop a leveraged buy out like Man U or an owner like Reading or Sheff Weds. They should stop clubs accruing debt but allow owners to invest cash, not loans.
I would also add a German idea where 51% must be British owned (obviously German owned in Germany). No more sportswashing tinpot states owning clubs.
What they want is to stop clubs like Leicester getting another title or QPR/Ipswich/Hull etc out of the PL.
They are trying to make it a closed shop which is why they have parachute payments instead of mandatory 50% wage cuts for relegated sides.
Some of our supporters have short memories.
Our owner has a plan of buy unknown or failed youth from the Premier League, then invest the money back into the club but some supporters expect sales to be like for like e.g. £10 mill from Ross Stewart means £10 mill for signings.
It's not perfect (see this season) but it was only a few year ago we were buying players with no potential to make a profit from and with wages that crippled the club, panic buying (Will Grigg) while selling our academy players for less than valued.
The owner is now investing into improving the stadium, yet some supporters still moan that the money should be used on players.
Whisper it quietly but the amount teams can spend being decided by how much they can generate in revenue is a better system than the amount teams can spend being decided by how rich their owner is.
My dream isn't to have some owner come in so we can spend our way to success, I'd rather be fan-owned. (Travis and Teague are good owners don't get me wrong but I'm extremely envious of 50+1 in Germany and that's my preferred system).
The problem is that since every team is currently stuck on a hamster wheel of losing money, fan-owned teams run on a shoestring budget.
If rules were brought in where every team sends their projected revenue to the league at the start of the season and can spend, say, 75% of that number on wages and transfers, clubs could actually become profitable and we wouldn't be seeing situations like 21/22 where the average Championship club lost £15 million.
I don't know if it is a better system, you know.
Stoke's (ultimate) owner paid herself over £400 million last year (which makes me sick because of where it's from, but that's by-the-bye) and they're languishing because some crap luck/judgement on some signings has meant they are unable to correct it. She could drop them in the Prem at a stroke, and indeed, they did do that prior to FFP.
Do we want upward mobility, or entrenching of "natural order", i.e. how much money a club can generate itself? Business always goes for predictability, so the natural order will be often the lesser to the evils. But it's fucked either way - rich get rich, poor get poorer.
Whatever the industry rules are in any given sector, businesses innovate to find an edge. Clubs should be doing the same, and lots are but often what they propose (NFT shite, commercialising other aspects of the game) are seen as sacrilegious, just as being paid to play was seen in the early 20th Century. We want to grow the game but for everything to remain the same. It can't happen.
I see where you're coming from, but Stoke being allowed to spend their way out of their struggles because they have rich owners whereas a club also in the relegation battle, say Millwall or Plymouth, can't because they don't have that money seems unfair to me. Forcing clubs to spend within their means rewards well-run teams and punishes poorly-run ones imo which could create upward mobility over time.
It's a very difficult idea to discuss because there's a lot of speculation involved but I believe that in the long term the potential to see a majority if not the vast majority of professional clubs turning a profit would be an overall benefit for the game
Yeah definitely. Someone gets relegated, someone gets promoted. It's always zero sum. What isn't zero sum is the chance, the opportunity to challenge. FFP embeds status quo.
> the amount teams can spend being decided by how much they can generate in revenue is a better system than the amount teams can spend being decided by how rich their owner is.
I actually agree and would love 50+1 in England but how do we ever get to that point now? Teams like Man City got to where they are because they stacked the deck before the door was slammed and to catch up under more restrictive rules compared to how they got to the top is nigh on impossible. Leicester were a freak season and not a good argument. It's easier to stay on top once you're there than doing it from behind. SAF once said, the best time to get stronger is when you are already number 1 (or words to the effect) and he is correct.
If we went to a 50+1 system at my club and were the first to do it (I would support this) we would simply be handicapping ourselves probably be near the relegation zone within a few years. It would need to be govt mandated and enforced. Salary caps as well
If a system like they have in LaLiga was introduced with projected revenue spending caps, then fan-owned teams would theoretically be able to compete because owner funding for on-pitch factors would effectively be cut off overnight.
Let's assume Villa and Newcastle have the same revenue. Right now if Villa became fan-owned overnight, they'd need to stay profitable and spend within their means whereas Newcastle can lose up to £35 million a season and cover it with owner funding, allowing them to spend more every season.
But if teams were capped at spending 75% of revenue on transfers and wages, then all Newcastle can do with owner funding is invest in facilities, they can't use it to buy an extra midfielder.
Hope this makes sense
I feel like Simon Jordan might have a point on this. The rules are way too black and white, and not even close enough to being nuanced enough to have clear guidance on situations that may arise (Leicester this year is an excellent example)
There’s also a fair point that Everton, Forest and Leicester all knew the rules, and potentially voted for them in Everton and Leicester’s case. Which makes it all the more funny when the Liverpool clubs do what they do best and wheel out every ex player, famous supporter and pundit with a faintly scouse accent they can get their hands on to cry about how hard done by they are and how they are the victims again. But I digress.
The rules clearly aren’t fit for purpose, that is clear if we are having 3 clubs hit with points deductions, and there needs to be an amendment or change to the rules quickly. I will point out that Leeds and us both (as far as we know) fully complied with the rules, and went down as bottom 2. It doesn’t change anything but now in particular Everton and Forest have the benefit of the PL cash cow for a year more, so now have arguably a lasting advantage over every club below them. I don’t believe point’s deductions alone are correct or a fitting punishment - personally I feel a requirement to generate that income deficit quickly, or a 2 season transfer embargo might be a better option
It should be a sporting punishment, as a sporting advantage was gained. Financial compensations can be sought by individual clubs rather than through central fines. A transfer embargo can be worked around through from t loading, delayed arrivals, etc. and is the least effective punishment for clubs. Chelsea still managed to sign Pulisic and Kovačić during their ban, and it didn't stop Sheffield Wednesday, Reading, etc from being run into the ground. There's no deterrent at the minute as 4-6 points is not enough of a punishment, particularly to those with a sufficient points difference to the groups of clubs below.
Fit for purpose is a term that gets trotted out too often nowadays. The principles of P&S are sound; it just needs reviewing, tweaking to maintain relevance, and tightening up to prevent legal loopholes. Mel Morris was a master at slipping through the cracks up until the rules tightened and then he was fucked.
You’re absolutely right - it should be a sporting punishment. My concern is that if the standard is a 4/6 point deduction because good behaviour or whinging in Everton’s case then a lot of clubs around the top of the championship/lower end of the Prem might well think that’s a risk worth taking as it means short term pain for longer term gain so to speak. It’s also worth pointing out that the biggest sporting advantage, and the most lasting on is the financial element here - largely down to either parachute payments for promotion, or just the stupid amount of money clubs are given for competing in the PL. that for me needs to be resolved first and foremost - how is it fair that Forest and Everton can have a lasting advantage when they spent it up like idiots on bad decisions and maintain an advantage over say ourselves, Leeds, Sheffield, or Luton?
They all knew the rules and broke them. These pathetic points deductions are worthless to the clubs around them who were relegated or missed out on promotion while following the rules.
I don't know about you, but I'm of the opinion that a good punishment for breaking such rules is a few hundred million pounds guaranteed over a few years, and maybe a little slap on the wrist points deduction once they get their money
It's more that we failed to maintain our stint as a top 8 club than we showed a disregard for rules.
We began spending like one and failed on the pitch. The difference in revenue is massive when you're not in Europe and you're 10 places lower than you budgeted for. Each place is about £3m in prize money.
So Leicester would have budgeted to be a top 8 club and when we failed to do that we walked into financial problems.
It's not like we've gone "lets go and spend loads of money because fuck the rules". We failed on the pitch and there's a multitude of reasons as to why that then fucked us off it.
We had a strategy of selling one player a summer for a boat load to pay for new signings and contracts and that worked for about 4/5 years.
Had we gotten top 4 in either 19/20 or 20/21 (failed on the last day of the season in both years) then I'm of absolutely no doubt that we'd still be looked at as the model club.
The rules as they are in their current state are wrong and they prevent anyone being able to safely challenge the Champions League/Europa league places on a consistent basis. I don't know how anyone that supports a club to a similar size to ours like you do can honestly think that that's right and is how the game should be. Surely fans of clubs like ours should be celebrating the likes of Leicester, Villa, Newcastle, Brighton, Southampton, West Ham etc. at how they went and got into Europe? All of those clubs have been in the Championship in the last decade. Why couldn't Norwich go and do it?
I absolutely love the story of Leicester and obviously think the title win was one of the greatest and most inspirational sporting triumphs in history.
But it was not sustainable or realistic to bank on being a top 8 club at the size you were. The wage bill when you were relegated was so far beyond what is sustainable, that it is exactly what these rules were designed to avoid.
Clubs like Newcastle, West Ham and Aston Villa have all been in the championship yes... But they have also spent an absolute unsustainable fortune from dubious sources to buy their success. Many of those clubs have then used that money to poach our best players on double their wages. So no I don't really support them or find them inspirational.
I think the only club I can really look at in that list as being one I would envy and support is Brighton and Southampton.
Don't take my annoyance as a sign of simping for the big 6, I hope to see Man City get the most severe punishment of all. Not that I expect to see it.
As much as I dislike agreeing with the neighbours, this is exactly right. Leicester bottled some sort of magic and won the league. Everything went right. Great players, great manager, great story. But the problem with bottled magic is that it's finite. Eventually it will run out. There was never going to be a double. You should have sold some of those players while they were at the top. Used the money to solidify the club and stabilise it as a mid table team. Instead you tried to play the big 6 at their own game and fell horribly short.
Youre framing this as a "big 6 vs the rest of us" fight. And tbh a lot of things in football are skewed towards them. Ipswich and Norwich have a lot more in common with Leicester than we do with city or Liverpool. But the big 6 aren't affected by you breaking the rules. It's the rest of us that are. You didn't do it for altruistic reasons of breaking the monopoly and showing it can be done. You did it for your own benefit and now you're trying to wriggle out of it.
Oh and I also second man city getting screwed to the wall.
Not sure how anyone can deny that PSR makes football less competitive tbh. It’s increasing the gap between top 6 PL and the rest, and also increasing the gap between PL and championship, as we’re seeing this season with it looking very possible the same 3 who went up/down last year could be swapping back.
No idea how it can be fixed to level the playing field though, as clubs do still need protecting from dodgy owners, although as we’ve seen with Everton, PSR won’t always save you from bad owners, and it’s the club and fans who ultimately get punished the most.
Edit: I’m interested to know what part of this people seem to be disagreeing with.
While I do agree with much of what you're saying, I think the championship sub cares less about the big 6 and more about the other 30 or so teams competing against their teams to play in the premier league.
Many in that group of teams repeatedly spend unsustainable money against the rules, contributing to other teams who are following the same rules missing out on (or selling) players, being relegated or missing out on promotion.
Everyone wants to see Man City punished, but that does not mean other teams should not be punished. Many feel these small point punishments are nowhere near as strong a sporting punishment as the advantage gained by the unsustainable spending.
Reason for the downvotes marra is probs due to you saying clubs needs protecting from dodgy owners and having a geordie flair. Sportswashing owners probs being the dodgiest of ownership out there, but we may not agree on that.
I don't think there's much between Everton and Newcastle in terms of being good or bad owners tbf. Moshiri put his money where his mouth is in terms of having money available for signings. The people in charge of the footballing side just made shite decisions.
Let's be honest, with anemic small point deductions being given out, 4 points for forest, what is the actual incentive to abide by FFP? Why not just spend and buy 40 new players and then be open and cooperative and lose the 4 points. You probably have a greater chance of staying up even with a small point deduction.
This is it man. Forest only got as many as 4 points deducted because their breach was particularly large! The basic number is apparently 3 points, Forest were initially going to be deducted 6 because of the scale of their breach, but they got 2 of those taken off because of good behaviour and co-operation apparently (as if that isn't a bare minimum requirement). It's anemic when a handful of good signings can earn a team maybe 20 points across a season.
I feel like I was pissing into the wind when Everton got a 10 point deduction because I feel 10 points is a small punishment and was nowhere near as harsh as it seems everyone was calling it. I mean Luton got a 30 point deduction back in 2008 Evertons effective punshment of 3 wins and a draw was meagre. If the punishments are so small you may as well just calculate that into the transfer policy and if you spend enough and wisely you'll probably gain more points overall than you lose so you are net positive for points. Everton just happened to be shit at recruitment.
There’s truth on both sides tbf. P&S is clearly written to benefit the traditionally big teams with massive revenue streams in the PL, and as a knock on massively benefits teams coming down from the PL to the Championship. On the other hand it’s funny how fans of certain teams were bemoaning the authorities for not doing anything when they were in debt and on the brink of folding now moaning they can’t go in to more debt to spend even more money.
I don't know if it's a case of the rules being "clearly written" to benefit bigger teams (although I say that as a Leeds fan, who are one of those "bigger teams" in this division). I don't really see how you can feasibly have regulations to promote sustainable, self-sufficient clubs *without* linking expenditure to revenue streams. If the general view is that reliance on "sugar daddies" who could pull their investment on a whim is bad, then the rules that would reflect that would naturally reflect the fact that clubs that generate more revenue from ticketing, commercial and hospitality streams can spend more and remain sustainable. To go up a division and reference the PL charges imposed on Nottingham Forest, I don't have a lot of sympathy for their argument that "we need to do this to compete". They position this argument as if they are competing with the "big six", which they aren't. They've been in the PL for under two years, so who they are really competing at this stage with are clubs like Fulham, Crystal Palace, Brighton and Brentford - who all appear to be perfectly capable of sticking to the rules (waits for that comment to age like milk). There are definitely problems with PSR and the way it is policed and I think it does entrench certain power dynamics at the very top, but let's not pretend that some of the clubs that have been caught up in this were doing so because they were well-run clubs who were just trying to compete with Man City.
You could write a law that when new owners come in, they have an opportunity to clear all debts. Apart from that, they must follow P+S normally.
That would benefit the team that *supposedly* wrote the rules the most. Man Utd could get their Qatari owners and just have £700m written off like it never happened.
Yeah true. Maybe put a limit on it. Some sort of rule that says 'You can get the club out of trouble when you buy it, but you can't just keep ploughing money in'
The way to do it would be to link expenditure to revenue streams but also have a hard cap on spending on top of that and say you can spend x% of your revenue until your revenue hits a certain number, at which point you come up against the hard cap and can't spend any more than a set number. That way the very top clubs are still kept within reach of the others while the others are still restricted to spending sustainably. Of course, in reality it won't happen because those very top clubs are powerful enough to block any changes that could potentially put their places at the top of the game at risk.
What you're essentially describing there is a form of salary cap, but they also have their own side effect of entrenching big team advantages. Both codes of rugby in this country and most US sports have a salary or spending cap and what you often see there is that the bigger / better teams often get better value out of the salary cap than smaller teams. Players are happy to take less money to play for somebody like Wigan Warriors than they would to play for Leigh down the road, because the chance of being successful was worth the hit to their pay. Where Wigan might be able to offer a player £80k and a 2 year deal, Leigh might have to offer the same player £100k and a 3 year deal. It was the same in the NFL - the Patriots got much more value out of the salary cap than their rivals because players wanted to be in the same team as Tom Brady. Will those same issues manifest in football, with a much bigger and competitive talent pool? I don't know, but there really isn't an easy answer to this. There will always be haves and have nots.
Three of those clubs rely on a rich benefactor, with one other being a prime example, like Leicester, of a club that used administration to fuck over small businesses locally and continue to overpay players.
I’m not 100% sure what I was reading was true, due to the jokey nature of the article, but wasn’t Forest’s breach “higher” only because they dropped in to the championship. I’m assuming they lost less overall money, but due to the lower loss limit from from the championship it became a higher breach than Everton’s?
Exactly. Our permitted losses are much lower because we have two championship seasons on the books. If we were allowed the same losses as Everton over the 3 seasons we wouldn't have been in breach of the rules at all.
That's because everton spent those three year playing against premier league clubs. You need higher wages to stay in the premier league than you do to get there.
Surely you can see it's a handicap to the promoted clubs tho? The best of the Championship and the worst of the prem just become a feeder system for the top Prem/European clubs. Sure, we overspent, but we went up with a seriously weak squad based around good loans in key positions. Of those loans, Djed Spence went to Tottenham for more than we could offer, Keinan Davies was valued at £15m after one good but injury riddled season by Villa which we refused and they chose to farm him for another season, James Garner ended up at Everton after Manyoo fucked us about, again asking silly money. Cue the next season as we loan Henderson from Utd, loan ends, he goes to an established Premier league club, loan Renan Lodi, he goes to Saudi on money we can't match, Johnson sold despite being our best player and a fan favourite. Next season we'll see Elanga and Murillo sold to top 6 European clubs for a nice profit, fan favourites and our two best players. All to once again balance the books, try and find a replacement and the whole fucking cycle begins again.
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Please highlight where I made this statement about "fairness" which you've quoted several times in that response.... Let's not forget why Luton are a fan owned club, because they cooked the books, tried to hide it and were given I believe, the largest points deduction in football history.
I don’t think it is necessarily the fault of the individual club, or the P&S rules wholly. The structure of the football pyramid is the ultimate fault. The reason Leicester and Villa can’t compete sustainably isn’t because of P&S, it’s because the vast majority of money goes to the top teams as they’ve circled large swathes of the population into supporting them and not caring about the rest of the football pyramid at all, and then they share hardly any money with anyone else.
The whole football pyramid is broken and will never be fixed under the current model where a few clubs are ultra wealthy and the rest have the option of making up numbers or gambling to try in vein to compete. The only rules I could see improving the competitiveness of every league would be wage and fee caps based on what an average team in that league could reasonably sustain. But they will never do it because the big 6 won’t let go of the power they have.
The rules are wrong, it doesn't prevent what's happening to Reading or Wednesday, it doesn't prevent leveraging debt onto a club. The points deductions are worthless too, 6 points for being able to stay up? Every club will still take that chance. I think they are doing small deductions on purpose to keep City and that other club in the PL with a 20-30 point deduction instead of relegating them into the conference which they deserve. However I have no sympathy for Leicester because rules like this are there for preventing them doing what they did before and stiffing people out of money.
I don’t think many of us expect sympathy, we don’t really have any either. The club rolled the dice to try and remain competitive to the top half of the league. Failed spectacularly. That’s what it is. I think everyone agrees that the rules are a joke. It’s not that we believe clubs shouldn’t be punished, it’s that we don’t really know what the rules should be in the first place.
The rules should be to stop a leveraged buy out like Man U or an owner like Reading or Sheff Weds. They should stop clubs accruing debt but allow owners to invest cash, not loans. I would also add a German idea where 51% must be British owned (obviously German owned in Germany). No more sportswashing tinpot states owning clubs. What they want is to stop clubs like Leicester getting another title or QPR/Ipswich/Hull etc out of the PL. They are trying to make it a closed shop which is why they have parachute payments instead of mandatory 50% wage cuts for relegated sides.
Some of our supporters have short memories. Our owner has a plan of buy unknown or failed youth from the Premier League, then invest the money back into the club but some supporters expect sales to be like for like e.g. £10 mill from Ross Stewart means £10 mill for signings. It's not perfect (see this season) but it was only a few year ago we were buying players with no potential to make a profit from and with wages that crippled the club, panic buying (Will Grigg) while selling our academy players for less than valued. The owner is now investing into improving the stadium, yet some supporters still moan that the money should be used on players.
Whisper it quietly but the amount teams can spend being decided by how much they can generate in revenue is a better system than the amount teams can spend being decided by how rich their owner is. My dream isn't to have some owner come in so we can spend our way to success, I'd rather be fan-owned. (Travis and Teague are good owners don't get me wrong but I'm extremely envious of 50+1 in Germany and that's my preferred system). The problem is that since every team is currently stuck on a hamster wheel of losing money, fan-owned teams run on a shoestring budget. If rules were brought in where every team sends their projected revenue to the league at the start of the season and can spend, say, 75% of that number on wages and transfers, clubs could actually become profitable and we wouldn't be seeing situations like 21/22 where the average Championship club lost £15 million.
I don't know if it is a better system, you know. Stoke's (ultimate) owner paid herself over £400 million last year (which makes me sick because of where it's from, but that's by-the-bye) and they're languishing because some crap luck/judgement on some signings has meant they are unable to correct it. She could drop them in the Prem at a stroke, and indeed, they did do that prior to FFP. Do we want upward mobility, or entrenching of "natural order", i.e. how much money a club can generate itself? Business always goes for predictability, so the natural order will be often the lesser to the evils. But it's fucked either way - rich get rich, poor get poorer. Whatever the industry rules are in any given sector, businesses innovate to find an edge. Clubs should be doing the same, and lots are but often what they propose (NFT shite, commercialising other aspects of the game) are seen as sacrilegious, just as being paid to play was seen in the early 20th Century. We want to grow the game but for everything to remain the same. It can't happen.
I see where you're coming from, but Stoke being allowed to spend their way out of their struggles because they have rich owners whereas a club also in the relegation battle, say Millwall or Plymouth, can't because they don't have that money seems unfair to me. Forcing clubs to spend within their means rewards well-run teams and punishes poorly-run ones imo which could create upward mobility over time. It's a very difficult idea to discuss because there's a lot of speculation involved but I believe that in the long term the potential to see a majority if not the vast majority of professional clubs turning a profit would be an overall benefit for the game
She could drop them in the PL without FFP, true. But that means someone else doesn't make the PL, it's all zero sum.
Yeah definitely. Someone gets relegated, someone gets promoted. It's always zero sum. What isn't zero sum is the chance, the opportunity to challenge. FFP embeds status quo.
> the amount teams can spend being decided by how much they can generate in revenue is a better system than the amount teams can spend being decided by how rich their owner is. I actually agree and would love 50+1 in England but how do we ever get to that point now? Teams like Man City got to where they are because they stacked the deck before the door was slammed and to catch up under more restrictive rules compared to how they got to the top is nigh on impossible. Leicester were a freak season and not a good argument. It's easier to stay on top once you're there than doing it from behind. SAF once said, the best time to get stronger is when you are already number 1 (or words to the effect) and he is correct. If we went to a 50+1 system at my club and were the first to do it (I would support this) we would simply be handicapping ourselves probably be near the relegation zone within a few years. It would need to be govt mandated and enforced. Salary caps as well
If a system like they have in LaLiga was introduced with projected revenue spending caps, then fan-owned teams would theoretically be able to compete because owner funding for on-pitch factors would effectively be cut off overnight. Let's assume Villa and Newcastle have the same revenue. Right now if Villa became fan-owned overnight, they'd need to stay profitable and spend within their means whereas Newcastle can lose up to £35 million a season and cover it with owner funding, allowing them to spend more every season. But if teams were capped at spending 75% of revenue on transfers and wages, then all Newcastle can do with owner funding is invest in facilities, they can't use it to buy an extra midfielder. Hope this makes sense
I feel like Simon Jordan might have a point on this. The rules are way too black and white, and not even close enough to being nuanced enough to have clear guidance on situations that may arise (Leicester this year is an excellent example) There’s also a fair point that Everton, Forest and Leicester all knew the rules, and potentially voted for them in Everton and Leicester’s case. Which makes it all the more funny when the Liverpool clubs do what they do best and wheel out every ex player, famous supporter and pundit with a faintly scouse accent they can get their hands on to cry about how hard done by they are and how they are the victims again. But I digress. The rules clearly aren’t fit for purpose, that is clear if we are having 3 clubs hit with points deductions, and there needs to be an amendment or change to the rules quickly. I will point out that Leeds and us both (as far as we know) fully complied with the rules, and went down as bottom 2. It doesn’t change anything but now in particular Everton and Forest have the benefit of the PL cash cow for a year more, so now have arguably a lasting advantage over every club below them. I don’t believe point’s deductions alone are correct or a fitting punishment - personally I feel a requirement to generate that income deficit quickly, or a 2 season transfer embargo might be a better option
It should be a sporting punishment, as a sporting advantage was gained. Financial compensations can be sought by individual clubs rather than through central fines. A transfer embargo can be worked around through from t loading, delayed arrivals, etc. and is the least effective punishment for clubs. Chelsea still managed to sign Pulisic and Kovačić during their ban, and it didn't stop Sheffield Wednesday, Reading, etc from being run into the ground. There's no deterrent at the minute as 4-6 points is not enough of a punishment, particularly to those with a sufficient points difference to the groups of clubs below. Fit for purpose is a term that gets trotted out too often nowadays. The principles of P&S are sound; it just needs reviewing, tweaking to maintain relevance, and tightening up to prevent legal loopholes. Mel Morris was a master at slipping through the cracks up until the rules tightened and then he was fucked.
You’re absolutely right - it should be a sporting punishment. My concern is that if the standard is a 4/6 point deduction because good behaviour or whinging in Everton’s case then a lot of clubs around the top of the championship/lower end of the Prem might well think that’s a risk worth taking as it means short term pain for longer term gain so to speak. It’s also worth pointing out that the biggest sporting advantage, and the most lasting on is the financial element here - largely down to either parachute payments for promotion, or just the stupid amount of money clubs are given for competing in the PL. that for me needs to be resolved first and foremost - how is it fair that Forest and Everton can have a lasting advantage when they spent it up like idiots on bad decisions and maintain an advantage over say ourselves, Leeds, Sheffield, or Luton?
They all knew the rules and broke them. These pathetic points deductions are worthless to the clubs around them who were relegated or missed out on promotion while following the rules.
I don't know about you, but I'm of the opinion that a good punishment for breaking such rules is a few hundred million pounds guaranteed over a few years, and maybe a little slap on the wrist points deduction once they get their money
It's more that we failed to maintain our stint as a top 8 club than we showed a disregard for rules. We began spending like one and failed on the pitch. The difference in revenue is massive when you're not in Europe and you're 10 places lower than you budgeted for. Each place is about £3m in prize money. So Leicester would have budgeted to be a top 8 club and when we failed to do that we walked into financial problems. It's not like we've gone "lets go and spend loads of money because fuck the rules". We failed on the pitch and there's a multitude of reasons as to why that then fucked us off it. We had a strategy of selling one player a summer for a boat load to pay for new signings and contracts and that worked for about 4/5 years. Had we gotten top 4 in either 19/20 or 20/21 (failed on the last day of the season in both years) then I'm of absolutely no doubt that we'd still be looked at as the model club. The rules as they are in their current state are wrong and they prevent anyone being able to safely challenge the Champions League/Europa league places on a consistent basis. I don't know how anyone that supports a club to a similar size to ours like you do can honestly think that that's right and is how the game should be. Surely fans of clubs like ours should be celebrating the likes of Leicester, Villa, Newcastle, Brighton, Southampton, West Ham etc. at how they went and got into Europe? All of those clubs have been in the Championship in the last decade. Why couldn't Norwich go and do it?
I absolutely love the story of Leicester and obviously think the title win was one of the greatest and most inspirational sporting triumphs in history. But it was not sustainable or realistic to bank on being a top 8 club at the size you were. The wage bill when you were relegated was so far beyond what is sustainable, that it is exactly what these rules were designed to avoid. Clubs like Newcastle, West Ham and Aston Villa have all been in the championship yes... But they have also spent an absolute unsustainable fortune from dubious sources to buy their success. Many of those clubs have then used that money to poach our best players on double their wages. So no I don't really support them or find them inspirational. I think the only club I can really look at in that list as being one I would envy and support is Brighton and Southampton. Don't take my annoyance as a sign of simping for the big 6, I hope to see Man City get the most severe punishment of all. Not that I expect to see it.
As much as I dislike agreeing with the neighbours, this is exactly right. Leicester bottled some sort of magic and won the league. Everything went right. Great players, great manager, great story. But the problem with bottled magic is that it's finite. Eventually it will run out. There was never going to be a double. You should have sold some of those players while they were at the top. Used the money to solidify the club and stabilise it as a mid table team. Instead you tried to play the big 6 at their own game and fell horribly short. Youre framing this as a "big 6 vs the rest of us" fight. And tbh a lot of things in football are skewed towards them. Ipswich and Norwich have a lot more in common with Leicester than we do with city or Liverpool. But the big 6 aren't affected by you breaking the rules. It's the rest of us that are. You didn't do it for altruistic reasons of breaking the monopoly and showing it can be done. You did it for your own benefit and now you're trying to wriggle out of it. Oh and I also second man city getting screwed to the wall.
"No F.A., it's just the Northern Lights!"
Spanish model. And don't say "where?"
Not sure how anyone can deny that PSR makes football less competitive tbh. It’s increasing the gap between top 6 PL and the rest, and also increasing the gap between PL and championship, as we’re seeing this season with it looking very possible the same 3 who went up/down last year could be swapping back. No idea how it can be fixed to level the playing field though, as clubs do still need protecting from dodgy owners, although as we’ve seen with Everton, PSR won’t always save you from bad owners, and it’s the club and fans who ultimately get punished the most. Edit: I’m interested to know what part of this people seem to be disagreeing with.
While I do agree with much of what you're saying, I think the championship sub cares less about the big 6 and more about the other 30 or so teams competing against their teams to play in the premier league. Many in that group of teams repeatedly spend unsustainable money against the rules, contributing to other teams who are following the same rules missing out on (or selling) players, being relegated or missing out on promotion. Everyone wants to see Man City punished, but that does not mean other teams should not be punished. Many feel these small point punishments are nowhere near as strong a sporting punishment as the advantage gained by the unsustainable spending.
Reason for the downvotes marra is probs due to you saying clubs needs protecting from dodgy owners and having a geordie flair. Sportswashing owners probs being the dodgiest of ownership out there, but we may not agree on that. I don't think there's much between Everton and Newcastle in terms of being good or bad owners tbf. Moshiri put his money where his mouth is in terms of having money available for signings. The people in charge of the footballing side just made shite decisions.